I thought it was time I gave Solaris Express a whirl on my Mac Pro (2006 version), as the bare-metal OS, rather than just virtualizing in VMWare Fusion. The main motivation for this is so I can give the xVM technologies a whirl. xVM is basically Sun’s spin of Xen.

The Mac booted of the DVD with no problems, I chose the ‘Developer Edition’ from the GRUB menu and it happily booted up into the graphical installer. It detected the disk I intended to install on so I selected it to be repartitioned using the whole disk. You can’t specify the partition layout within the ‘Solaris’ FDISK partition with this release so I just assigned the whole disk, not least because this saves a partition for you for live upgrade.

Unfortunately when it came time to do the install it failed with this message:

ERROR: The '/' slice extends beyond HBA cylinder 1023
WARNING: Change the system's BIOS default boot device for hands-off rebooting.

The BIOS default boot device is fair enough but the HBA cylinder error was a bit of a pain. After a few attempts with smaller disk sizes I eventually persuaded it to start the install by using a 8GB partition (the minimum allowed). Unfortunately this soon quit again with an error about the installer exiting abnormally. However the installer was clearly running in the background as the DVD was whiring away. A look in /tmp/install_log confirmed my suspicions. This eventually stopped logging after the boot blocks had been installed. I crossed my fingers ‘init 6′ed it and…

It booted up to GRUB! With ‘Solaris xVM’ as an option so I picked that, the hypervisor loaded and Solaris proceeded to boot and configured itself reasonably normally. There were some warnings about shared IRQs and the FMD reported receiving telemetry it didn’t understand, not surprising perhaps given the platform.

xVM seems to be working as expected, I can see the dom0 in ‘xm top’

xentop - 22:02:26   Xen 3.0.4-1-xvm
1 domains: 1 running, 0 blocked, 0 paused, 0 crashed, 0 dying, 0 shutdown
Mem: 2091296k total, 1963128k used, 128168k free    CPUs: 4 @ 2660MHz
NAME  STATE   CPU(sec) CPU(%)     MEM(k) MEM(%)  MAXMEM(k) MAXMEM(%) VCPUS NETS NETTX(k) NETRX(k) VBDS   VBD_OO   VBD_RD   VBD_WR SSID
Domain-0 -----r         87    6.2    1922552   91.9   no limit       n/a     4    0        0        0    0        0        0        0    0

Disabling network/physical:default and enabling Network Automagic with network/physical:nwam also worked as expected which was very nice to see.

I’m looking forward to experimenting more with this environment over the next few weeks, but for now I’m impressed it’s worked as well as it has given the slightly esoteric nature of the Mac Pro environment.

PS. I wish the EFI boot chooser didn’t label everything it doesn’t know as ‘Windows’. I will have to give reFIT a go at some point.

[UPDATE]

Got the LBA error fixed by manually creating the fdisk partition then re-running the installer.

After reinstalling NWAM was the default for networking, which did indeed work automagically.

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